Anarchist Critique of Radical Democracy: The Impossible Argument

By Markus Lundström

In the spring of 2013, a wave of urban riots swept across Sweden after police shot an elderly man in his own home. When community residents from his marginalized city-district demanded an official apology, they were ignored. The anti-police insurgences that followed addressed deep problems of the Swedish welfare state, and the official responses revealed glitches built into democracy itself.

In this updated edition of Anarchist Critique of Radical Democracy: The Impossible Argument, sociologist and historian Markus Lundström explores the boundaries of Swedish democracy. He probes in-depth interviews with community residents to explain how the 2013 riots intensified a profound democratic conflict: the social divide between the governors and the governed. Resistance to this divide is then traced through the defiance of governance and approaches to democracy in the history of anarchist thought.

This book offers an original introduction to anarchism. It relates the diversity of anarchist thought to anti-police riots and the radicalization of democracy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: PM Press
• Release date: Jan 24, 2023
• ISBN: 9781629639994

Markus Lundström

Markus Lundström is the author of The Making of Resistance: Brazil’s Landless Movement and Narrative Enactment, along with several articles venturing into the fields of anarchist, fascist, posthumanist and social movement studies.

Book preview

Cover: Anarchist Critique of Radical Democracy, The Impossible Argument by Markus Lundström

With admirable clarity and precision, Markus Lundström outlines the key ideas of anarchism and uses them as a lens through which to analyze popular struggle. By pivoting his argument on the notion of the impossible, he explores the inherent tensions at the heart of democracy. This little book is a great introduction to anarchist thinking about politics and a powerful examination of popular dissent.

—Iwona Janicka, author of Theorizing Contemporary

Anarchism: Solidarity, Mimesis and Radical Social Change

This book addresses the confusions and ambiguities about the values that we claim for our collective lives when we employ the term ‘democracy.’ Never has this been a more urgent task as the world accelerates into social, economic, and environmental chaos, apparently regardless of the will of populations living in proclaimed democracies. How can we understand and move beyond these experiences of ‘deprived political influence’? Lundström employs insights developed by anarchist writers and activists, particularly concerning domination, resistance, and conflict, to offer some clarity about these experiences. In this book, he helps us to think beyond the boundaries of the democratic tradition (where necessary) so that we can decide for ourselves which ways of life are possible and which we would like to make impossible.

—Carissa Honeywell, author of Anarchism

In a nuanced, incisive, and admirably inclusive account of classical and contemporary anarchist thought, Lundström makes the Impossible Argument plausible. The critique of repressive and punitive authority must be in productive dialogue with the struggle to build non-hierarchical democratic relations if we are to sustainably change what ‘democracy’ looks like. Radical democratic thinking and action are vital in confronting the challenges of our times—the undermining of extractive and exploitative relations and the promotion of flourishing for all communities, human and not.

—Erika Cudworth, coauthor, with Steve Hobden, of

The Emancipatory Project of Posthumanism

"Lundström’s comprehensive, accessible, and inclusive examination of anarchist thought defends an approach to democracy that combines uncompromising critique with a conception of anarchising change."

—Ruth Kinna, author of The Government of No

One: The Theory and Practice of Anarchism

This book offers a powerful critical inquiry into the relationship between anarchism and democracy. Lundström traces a genealogy of critique that sheds new light on the conflict at the heart of democracy and its imperative to govern. Anarchism, he contends, must be understood as lying elsewhere than in such appeals to authority. In placing anarchism outside of these bounds, Lundström compellingly argues that we must move beyond the enchanting discourse of democracy, even in its radicalized form, to accept anarchism on its own terms.

—Simon Springer, author of Fuck Neoliberalism: Translating Resistance

This is movement-based theorizing at its best. Lundström offers a compelling genealogy that details how anarchism might radicalize democracy or might have to move entirely beyond it.

—Richard Day, author of Gramsci Is Dead: Anarchist

Currents in the Newest Social Movements

This book takes seriously tensions within anarchism between making democracy more participatory versus making a more radical arrangement beyond democracy. Lundström exemplifies these tensions and appeals to a variety of anarchist writers for the theoretical tools to think through this tension productively.

—Kathy Ferguson, author of Emma Goldman:

Political Thinking in the Streets

Advancing on the anarchist tradition, Lundström’s argument is timely, compelling, and deeply grounded in the collective experience of radical democratic contestation. This book deserves wide attention from scholars and activists alike.

—Uri Gordon, author of Anarchy Alive! AntiAuthoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory

Authoritarian Politics from Practice to Theory

"Lundström convincingly argues that the aporias of democracy are best explored within the anarchist tradition, which has always had an ambivalent attitude to democracy: what he calls the ‘Impossible

Argument.’ In drawing on the theoretical resources of nineteenth- and twentieth-century anarchism, as well as empirical research from the site of contemporary struggles against the state, Lundström effectively illustrates the central tensions of democracy, developing from this new way of thinking about radical democracy in the twenty-first century."

—Saul Newman, author of Postanarchism

It is easy to dismiss rioting youth as hooligans engaging in senseless violence. It is much more difficult but also much more rewarding to see them as political actors challenging formal frameworks of governance. Luckily, Lundström has stepped up to the task.

—Gabriel Kuhn, author of All Power to the Councils! A

Documentary History of the German Revolution of 1918–1919

The very best and most fruitful interrogations of political life often come from a deep and scrupulous plunge into a single event. So it is with Markus Lundström’s brilliant analysis of the battle in the streets of Husby in 2013. The result is a subtle, philosophically informed, and original understanding of the possibilities for enacting the promise of anarchism.

—James Scott, author of The Art of Not Being Governed:

An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia

Anarchist Critique of

Radical Democracy

The Impossible Argument

Markus Lundström

Anarchist Critique of Radical Democracy: The Impossible Argument

Markus Lundström © 2023

This edition © PM Press

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.

ISBN: 978–1–62963–998–7 (paperback)

ISBN: 978–1–62963–999–4 (ebook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022943206

Cover design by John Yates/www.stealworks.com

Interior design by briandesign

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Printed in the USA

Contents

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

The Search for Radical Democracy

Anti-Police Riots in Sweden

Anarchism and Democracy

The Impossible Argument

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

to the ungovernable

Preface to the Second Edition

In the spring of 2013, massive protests against the police swept across Sweden. The spark was, as so often, a police shooting. An elderly man had been shot in his home, and the police tried to cover up the incident. Lenine Relvas-Martins was a sixty-nine-year-old community member of Husby, a marginalized city district in Stockholm that for years had put up with state-led mistreatment. Following the death of Relvas-Martins, Husby residents organized a demonstration to protest against police violence. Their demands for an official apology were ignored. One week after the killing, groups of people began to tackle police violence with other methods. During some intense May nights, violent confrontations between police and their adversaries in Husby triggered anti-police riots that soon spread to other cities across Sweden. Police cars, police stations, and police officers were attacked. In response, the state launched one of the fiercest police interventions in Swedish history; on the streets of Husby, people of all stripes were beaten, assaulted, humiliated, and violently racialized.

These painful experiences will no doubt linger in Husby’s collective memory. In official discourse, however, they seem to be forgotten. When anti-police mobilization exploded in the 2020s US, following a series of racist police killings, demonstrations were held in Sweden in solidarity with Black Lives Matter. As political commentators debated racist police violence and anti-police demonstrations in Swedish mass media, not a single reference was made to the local anti-police riots that had taken place only a few years earlier. With a remarkably short memory, social mobilization in the US was generally portrayed as a struggle for democracy, whereas the Husby riots of 2013 had been described as an overall threat to democracy. That precise ambiguity is the theme of this book. We will revisit the 2013 anti-police riots in Sweden against a backdrop of democratic failure. We will then venture into an ideological tradition generically resistant to governance, namely, anarchism—with the overall aim being to spotlight ongoing searches for a more radical democracy.

My motivation for writing this book comes partly from personal encounters with state violence. Though comparably mild, these experiences awoke in me an urge to understand and to study the very nature of domination. That voyage took me deep into the political tradition that struggles for nothing less than to make every form of domination impossible. While studying the history of anarchist thought, I began to notice vivid ungovernable weeds of resistance sprouting even in the most democratic of environments. When listening to the people of Husby, I glimpsed into the depths of that complex collective experience. By reading radical democratic theorists, not least Jacques Rancière, I found tools to identify social antagonism within these experiences: the division between democratic government and those it tries to govern. That antagonism of democracy is at the heart of this updated edition of Anarchist Critique of Radical Democracy: The Impossible Argument.

The Search for Radical Democracy

My first encounter with a large-scale rally as an active participant was in December 2009. I was one of about a hundred thousand people who had gathered in Copenhagen to demonstrate and draw attention to the urgency of the political-ecological issues so obviously ignored by the governors of our democratic nation-states; we wanted more people to act as if our world(s) mattered. At the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference—the Copenhagen Summit—international cooperation again proved unable to deal with the severe threat of environmental degradation. In the shadow of that intense presence of global governance, I was introduced to ungovernable resistance enacted amid apparent powerlessness.

A few blocks down the march road, I saw police break into the demonstration, blocking both the way forward and the way back. A certain segment of the rally, about a thousand individuals, had been contained, since we apparently represented, as the police repeatedly told us, the problematic part of the demo. Perhaps that was not incorrect. Some of us were, indeed, masked and dressed in black, confirming the iconic imagery of anarchist troublemakers, and many would certainly pay tribute to the enduring anarchist tradition. As we were sitting there, hour after hour, in temporary (and even, as it later turned out, illegal) confinement, people began chanting, cunningly, the very characteristic call-and-response of the late alterglobalization movement: show me what democracy looks like! and this is what democracy looks like!

Echoing between the walls in the twilight of midwinter Copenhagen, the chant delivered a rather cynical subtitle to that confined part of the rally. As a sarcastic reference to the leitmotif associated with the acclaimed nonproblematic part of the demo, the chant asserted, when coming from our restrained black bloc, an anarchist critique of democracy.

The aim of this book is to trace the genealogy of that critical thought, to expose and theorize a social conflict embedded in democracy itself: the antagonism between the government and those it tries to govern. The starting point for this exploration derives not from the self-identified anarchist milieu but from the collective experiences of democratic social conflict in Husby, a Stockholm city district located at Sweden’s sociopolitical periphery. In the Swedish spring of 2013, a series of anti-police riots started in Husby and eventually spread throughout the country, challenging the image of Sweden as a peaceful and inclusive state of democracy. The social antagonism culminated in what became known as the Husby riots, which triggered one of the fiercest police interventions in Swedish history.

This book shows what democracy can look like when political activities are ignored and suppressed by municipal and state governors. In this sense, the Husby case exposes the conflictual nature of democracy, a conception that is central to ongoing scholarly theorizations and pursuit of a more radical democracy. Our inquiry into conflictual democratic antagonism will be guided by the radical democratic theory of Jacques Rancière, exposing an antagonism between the democratic life of the Husby community and the ignorant and repressive response of the democratic state. We will also see how these collective experiences include resistance struggles to remain ungovernable. The book digs deeper into this resistance phenomenon—the experiential critique of the democratic state—by exploring a political ideology targeting that very antagonism. In the historical tradition of anarchism, we will trace critical approaches to democracy in relation to anarchy. As we shall see, this ideological tradition not only defies the social divide between governors and governed but also nurtures a critique of democratic radicalization. This book aims to connect that anarchist critique, that Impossible Argument, to ongoing struggles for a more radical democracy.